The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a time when the countryside of the province of Damascus enjoyed relative security and stability. There were not many complaints about banditry or marauding troops, and the local ayan were brought to heal in the vezierates of Koprulu Mehmed and his son Fazil Ahmed Pasha. Even the weather cooperated for the most part. However, the rise of the Azms in the 1720's and 30's, while generally promoting the security of the rural areas, also put the countryside under greater pressure, for the Azms created new in-kind levies upon peasant communities. Little research has been conducted on the productive capacity of this region during this period, when political conditions were favorable for production, populations were no longer abandoning their villages en masse, and production for the European market was still modest. My paper will explore the question the agricultural output in this era by focusing on three issues of production: cultivation techniques; estimations of output per feddan for wheat, barley and straw; the inroads of non-comestible cash crops such as cotton in this period. The paper relies on an unusually wide variety of sources to inform its conclusions in these areas. The first section of the paper surveys the mechanics of sowing, tending and harvesting, both for fruits and for grains. Explaining irrigation and crop rotation techniques, my paper will draw primarily on Abd al-Ghani al-Nablusi's treatise 'Ilm al-Filaha and on information contained in the fatwas of the Damascene muftis. In order to establish productivity per feddan in the second part of the paper, my analysis pairs information from the Ottoman Tapu Tahrir Defterleri with Damascene court records of goods levied in kind as taxes in the Azm period and the late seventeenth century. Examining the spread of cotton cultivation in the third part of the paper combines the observations of English and Franch merchants with figures and information gleaned from the court records and fatwas. The conclusions are not meant to be precise, but rather helpful estimations for other scholars engaged in comparative studies of early modern political economy, and as a contribution to the knowledge of the history of Syrian political economy in the 'longue duree'.

Despite the fact that Ottoman statesmen initiated the fundamental reform movement known as Tanzimat in 1839, it was not until the 1860s that the reforms were first introduced to the periphery of empire. In doing so, the Ottoman administration chose the Danube province as the pilot region where their governor Midhat Pasha would carry out the reforms as examples for the other provinces. At that time, the economy of the Balkans was highly dependent upon agriculture, and there were no institutions like those in Europe offering loans to farmers and meeting their needs, such as land, seeds and animals. Loan sharks and gospodars (landowners) benefited from the lack of such an institution by lending money to peasants at high interest rates and requiring them to perform corvee labor. In this situation, the peasants had no opportunity to advance their agricultural activities, as they were highly dependent on these lenders. Midhat Pasha was aware of this problem, and so he observed the examples of agricultural organizations in Europe. Thus, in 1863, when he was the governor of Nish, he established an experimental agricultural credit cooperative called Memleket Sandigi in Pirot (Sarkoy or Sehirkoy). It was to provide farmers with credit at low interest rates, seeds and animals, to create cooperation among them and to promote the agricultural production to a higher degree, independent of the landlords. It also aimed at opening a large amount of arable land for farming. It was the first agricultural credit cooperative in Ottoman history, and would form the origin of the agricultural bank of modern Turkey. In this paper, I will examine this new institution as part and parcel of the Ottoman reform movement with an emphasis on the changing role of government in agriculture and rural life. I intend to make use of the documents in Basbakanlik Osmanli Arsivi (the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives) in Istanbul, which directly concern Midhat Pasha's activities and reforms in the Danube province. These documents are mainly comprised of the Irades (imperial degrees) such as Irade Dahiliye, Irade Hariciye, Irade Meclis-i Vala, etc. In addition to these documents, the first provincial newspaper, Tuna Gazetesi, the Salnames (yearbooks of the province) and the memoirs of Midhat Pasha himself are also used in my research. Finally, I will reference a number of secondary sources written in English, Turkish, Bulgarian and Russian languages.

Many histories of Ottoman property relations in nineteenth century Syria defined communities involved in mobile pastoralism as the main obstacle to the state's attempts to control and increase local production through intrusive land reforms. Assuming the state's project to create a "rule of property" was a natural step towards an externally defined modernity, much of the literature has imagined communities engaged in pastoralism as "nomadic tribes" inherently opposed to and separate from state initiatives, agricultural production and settled cultivating communities. Recent studies have problematized this characterization, noting the linkages and overlap between pastoral and cultivating communities in addition to the integrated role mobile pastoralists played in agricultural and other types of production as well as in the movement of goods. However, these studies have not addressed the political tensions attending Ottoman attempts to define and manage property relations between communities using land for agricultural purposes and those involved in transhumant pastoralism. This paper investigates the contested administration of modern land reform by focusing on the discourse through which Ottoman jurists and bureaucrats, as well as local communities understood the boundaries, connections and contests between those using land for agricultural and pastoral purposes. Incorporating material from both the imperial and local levels, I explore the categories that shaped the administration of property reform in a provincial district of Ottoman Syria during the high point of attempts to implement the Land Code and related Regulations (1880-1915). Through a reading of unpublished Shari'a court records of disputes over property and property registration, I identify the terms court scribes and judges employed to define various members of the rural population and to attempt to regulate their control over land and its use. I then investigate the meaning of these terms, including "tribe" and "tent-dweller", as administrative categories in empire-wide property reforms and the extent to which they represented a break with former orderings. Utilizing property-related legislation as well as memoirs of late Ottoman bureaucrats and jurists, I explore the discursive frameworks through which reformers understood local connections and contestations between pastoralists and cultivators and the tensions involved in their promulgations of modern reforms. Highlighting the politics of administration in a complex local economy, this paper argues that local actors involved in pastoralism both reified and contested the boundaries of imperial administrative categories employed in attempts to increase state control over land use.

Various programs were introduced by American missionaries in Eastern Anatolia and Syria to foster agricultural development, modernization, and scientific progress. Many of these programs were done with conscious attention to the issues of ethnic self-determination and population pressures. This paper will show how projects of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions attempted to shape both specific agricultural practices and the socio-political relations between provincial farming communities and regional and imperial actors. For example, a certain Mr. Knapp, Harvard '87, who had arrived in 1899 with his wife and three children to the Harpoot Mission with the express charge of helping Armenian orphans in the wake of the 1894-96 Hamidian massacres, by 1905 was aiming to open a farm for orphan boys, to be overseen by an Armenian graduate of the Amherst Agricultural School in Massachusetts. There had been talk among the missionaries of the problem of losing the best Armenian students to permanent migration to the United States, and various projects were envisioned to bring some back to aid the mission in the homeland. The Amherst Agricultural School hoped to be a national and international leader in scientific agriculture, and it made sense for the missionaries from Massachusetts to try agricultural projects in their field missions. In the face of Ottoman pressures against the missionaries and the Armenian communities they were intimately involved with, possession of the land, including farming rights, became areas of political contestation. Research for this paper will examine the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions archives for reports about farming in Eastern Anatolia and specific attempts to implement scientific agriculture to examine the motivations and experiences of those involved, the local results, and interactions with regional and state actors in this arena. Although American missionary activities were ended by the Turkish War of Independence, American interest in agricultural projects in Anatolia has continued through the Republican period.

This paper proposes to explore the codification of agricultural expertise within the context of the late Ottoman Empire. In particular, it aims to demonstrate what it meant for the Ottoman state to deem the transmission of agricultural knowledge a matter for government-sponsored schools and textbooks rather than an expertise to be passed down within the context of the local community. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a period in which many Ottoman bureaucrats embraced a discourse of progress and modernity, the practical implementation of which involved, among other things, encouraging the spread of new technologies and the increased institutionalization of knowledge transmission within certain fields. One such field was agriculture. Efforts at development throughout the empire often included the establishment of institutions for agricultural education both within Anatolia proper and throughout the empire's provinces. These were projects aimed at all members of agrarian society: men, women, and children, each with their specific role to play in making farming a more productive and profitable enterprise. Such increased productivity was certainly in the state's interest as it promised greater revenues. Using textbooks authored by a member of the 1914 Ottoman Parliament, an agronomist who served as head of the Agricultural Department, this paper proposes to examine the practical mechanics of how agriculture was packaged as a science to be taught in institutions of the state. In this paper, I address what it meant for the reproduction of knowledge to be removed from a local context in which it would have been conveyed by local experts to the classroom of the state. I examine the specific roles delineated for women, children and men in these circumstances. Furthermore, the paper explicates what types of knowledge were deemed new and scientific and how the process of replacing what was deemed antiquated knowledge with these modern technologies and techniques provided opportunities for the state to insert itself more directly into farmers' lives. Like other states that sought to increase revenue through higher agricultural productivity, the Ottomans grappled with how to reap the abundance and prosperity promised by mechanized agriculture while simultaneously coping with its high cost. Subsidizing education that encouraged the application of techniques and practices deemed scientific represented, at least for policy makers, one step towards realizing this goal of increased productivity.